moving here :Development News

How do you top distributing 250,000 seedlings every year to gardeners and urban farmers throughout the city? The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) is working on it.

Recently, we checked out the installation of a new solar power array in Strawberry Mansion, our current On the Ground neighborhood. PHS has been building two new Green Resource Centers (GRC) over the past eighteen months (it already has four others throughout the city): one on the Strawberry Mansion site and another in South Philadelphia on a formerly vacant lot at 2500 Reed Street. (GRCs are a part of PHS's City Harvest program.)

The South Philly site is a partnership between the lot owner (the nearby Church of the Redeemer Baptist), PHS and the Nationalities Service Center (NSC), which works with refugees resettling in Philadelphia. NSC leases about two-and-a-half acres (of the three-and-a-half acre lot) from the church, and worked with PHS to develop a large community garden there.

"It’s an entire city block and it’s right by the old rail line, so it’s really a wonderful place to have a community garden," says Nancy Kohn, Director of Garden Programs at PHS. Before NSC and PHS arrived, the long-unused site was full of debris, rubble and stones. Volunteers from Villanova University and various corporate partners pitched in to clear the land and build hundreds of raised garden beds. Now the site has its own water line, a shed and 400 beds.

Half of those are "entrepreneurial beds," according to Kohn, for people who grow and sell vegetables to nearby businesses and restaurants. The rest are community garden beds open to the public.

The opportunity to garden is important to many NSC clients.

"A lot of refugees that are coming through this program have an agricultural background," explains Kohn. "The community garden has been a wonderful place to get them more connected to their background, as well as connected to their neighbors, who are South Philly natives."

Meanwhile, the impact of the GRCs extends citywide: Through the network, volunteers and PHS staff propagate a total of 250,000 seedlings each year, to be distributed to gardens and farms all over town (with the two new GRCs completed soon, that number will grow significantly). Participating volunteers give ten hours of work to the PHS site over the season and receive the seedlings in return. Earlier this month, PHS had a mass distribution of nine different varieties of veggies, including peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, tomatoes and okra.

"The gardeners come to pick them up," says Kohn. "They take them back to their gardens, and they grow them for their communities."

Because of the landowner's evolving plan to eventually build a new church on the site, the community gardens will stay and continue to partner with PHS, but the permanent GRC will be built in another South Philly location (to be announced soon). The site will include a new greenhouse, demonstration and community garden beds for educational workshops, solar paneling for electric power, a wash station and a shade structure.

Kohn hopes the build-out on the new site will begin later this summer; the GRC should be up and running by next spring.

You want to buy a house. Besides your agent and a pre-approval on a mortgage, where do you start? It’s easy to get a comprehensive look at what’s available for sale through multiple listing services (MLS) like Trulia or TREND, filtered by categories such as location, property type and price. But what if you want to rent an apartment?

In Philly, you’re often doomed to crowdsourcing your social networks, hoping a friend of a friend has space to rent, or wading through the swamps of a website like Craigslist, whose listings, once posted, can’t be updated and can get buried in a matter of minutes.

Ishay Grinberg, the founder and CEO of Boston-based Rental Beast, calls the rental status quo in Philly "a nightmare," and he wants to change that. His site is an MLS for rentals, and it’s ready to put about one million listings at prospective renters’ fingertips through its network of hyper-local real estate experts.

"About forty percent of the population rents, and about forty percent of the population will continue to rent," explains Grinberg, acknowledging the boom in home-ownership that peaked in 2005 -- and, well, we all know what happened next.

"Almost everywhere you look if you drive around, you start seeing ‘for rent’ signs," he says of Philly, where a Rental Beast team is already set up in Center City, readying an official launch for early 2015. "There’s plenty of demand to be satisfied."

Rental Beast works for renters as well as landlords and property managers, from those handling just a few properties to those handling thousands. In less than five years, the company has seen huge success in Boston, nabbing 70 percent of the city’s market share. Now its sights are set on Philly, its suburbs and the surrounding area, including central Pennsylvania, and parts of Delaware and New Jersey.

"We’re completely free for landlords of any size to list with us," insists Grinberg.

That free-of-charge model for both landlords and prospective tenants is supported by large brokerages who partner with the company for access to its inventory, and provide a portion of the broker fee when a property is leased through the site.

But the service isn’t just about aggregating and maintaining the most up-to-date, customizable info from landlords, managers, brokers, neighborhood experts and wider market data. Users also have access to tools for everything from proper pricing to drawing up the lease to finding contractors for when there’s quick turnover on a unit.

"When small landlords have a unit turn over, they don’t have an armada of maintenance people like the large managers do," explains Grinberg. For jobs like cleaning, sanding or painting, Rental Beast maintains a free database of vetted service providers.

Philly’s "good startup community" is part of the reason he’s bringing Rental Beast to the area. With the growing trend of millennials staying in the city to work or launch their own ventures after graduation, he insists it’s the perfect time to simplify the rental market.

On September 12, the 51-year-old University City Science Center celebrated the latest addition to its ever-expanding West Philadelphia campus, now home to more than two million square feet of lab and office space.

Known as 3737 Science Center and located at 3737 Market Street, the 13-story glass tower was developed jointly by the Science Center and Wexford Science & Technology. The $115 million building is already at 82 percent capacity.

Indeed, interest in the space from potential life-science and healthcare tenants was so consistently strong throughout construction that an extra two floors (over the originally-planned 11) were added to the plan.

3737 Science Center is the campus' 16th building. At nearby 3601 Market Street, the Science Center is currently constructing a 20-story, $110 million residential tower, which broke ground last year. That high-rise, according to President and CEO Stephen Tang, is part of the campus' current philosophy "to be a place to live, work and play," he says. "Not just work, which is quite frankly what we've been doing for most of our 51-year history."

"We're trying to become a world-class innovation center across University City and not just across the Science Center's campus," he adds. "We really want to be a vibrant center. And that includes attracting smart, creative and innovative people to our campus to live, as well as to work."

The rebuilding of Dilworth Plaza from a drab, inaccessible concrete slab encircling Philadelphia's City Hall into Dilworth Park, a green public space set to become one of Center City's most exciting outdoor areas, has been one of the most closely watched local development stories for three years now.

Finally, the $55 million project's official opening date has been made public. During an August 19 press conference, Center City District CEO Paul Levy announced that the park will be unveiled Thursday, September 4 at 11 a.m. with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

As Flying Kite reported in late 2010, a 185-foot-wide programmable fountain operating on recycled rain water will be one of the park's centerpieces; it will be transformed into an ice skating rink during the winter months.

And because the 120,000-square-foot project's main mission has always centered on enhancing access to the nucleus of Philly's public transit system, it makes sense that two subway entrances made of glass -- and seemingly inspired by the Louvre Pyramid -- are architectural standouts as well.

Perhaps the most exciting Dilworth update, though, involves Chef Jose Garces being attached to the cafe that will sit in the Plaza's northwest corner. The breakfast-all-day eatery will be similar to Garces' Rosa Blanca and offer light Cuban-inspired fare.

Although roughly 10 percent of the project's construction won't be complete for another six to eight weeks, an entire weekend's worth of events will celebrate its opening, beginning with an all-day arts and culture festival on September 4.

Click here for a complete list of the weekend's scheduled performances and events.

Flying Kite has spilled a decent amount of (virtual) ink in the last few months on the various issues surrounding the future of one of South Philadelphia's most important thoroughfares, Washington Avenue. But a recent Pennsport community meeting to discuss a proposed mini-business complex has us wondering why the wide and tree-lined Moyamensing Avenue hasn't been part of that conversation as well. (Moyamensing runs at an angle from Christian Street down to Snyder Avenue.)

"There's plenty of housing in the neighborhood, but there really aren't that many amenities," says architect Alex Duller of FUSA Designs. Duller, along with Brandon Fox of MSCretail, hopes to change that. The pair presented plans at the aforementioned meeting for a small commercial complex of seven businesses on the corner of Moyamensing and Moore Streets.

According to Duller, talks are already underway with the owners of a coffee shop, a yoga studio, a specialty food grocer and an ice cream parlor. Duller and Fox also hope to bring in a restaurant, but for the time being, only one local business owner -- Sean Mellody of Mellody Brewing -- has signed a letter of intent.

Mellody hopes to offer limited onsite sales and open a tasting room inside the brewery. But, as Duller explains, none of the development plans can move forward unless the complex's buildings -- currently zoned for single-family residential use -- are rezoned as mixed commercial structures.

"Right now, no one's willing to sign a letter of intent based on the fact that [the space] is still zoned for single-family," he says.

Duller and Fox will present their plan to the Zoning Board of Adjustment at the end of July. If the re-zoning passes, groundbreaking could commence as early as spring 2015.

At the intersection of Fitzwater Street and Grays Ferry Avenue in Graduate Hospital, a 125-year-old former Catholic chapel has been adapted into 30 loft-style homes and eight apartments. They are now leasing.

Known as Sanctuary Lofts -- and most recently occupied by the congregation of St. Matthew Baptist Church -- the structure was one of 20 Philadelphia sites that appeared on the 2011 list of endangered historical properties released by Save Our Sites, an urban preservationist group. At the time, the church's congregation feared the building would be demolished to make way for housing if it were sold.

Instead, the site was purchased by Barzilay Development, a local firm specializing in the adaptive reuse of old buildings. According to Alon Barzilay, the firm's founder and CEO (and son of former Toll Brothers president and COO Zvi Barzilay), the renovated loft spaces will be rich in intricately preserved details such as exposed marble and salvaged hardwood floors. Even some of the church's pews are being repurposed.

Rents start at around $1,200 for a one-bedroom loft. Many of the project's most impressive features can be seen simply by viewing the church's exterior. A 128-footgranite clock tower is the jewel of the building -- it earned its 15 minutes of fame after appearing in director M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense. Also impressive are the church's stained-glass windows and its distinctive red door; an outdoor garden courtyard with church pew seating will be completed soon.

A model unit is currently available for viewing; visit sanctuary-lofts.com for photos and to read about the church's history.

After searching for a location in the Kensington area for more than two years, the site-selection committee of the soon-to-be-built member-owned grocery store has announced an end to its quest.

The market will take root at the corner of Frankford and East Lehigh Avenues in East Kensington, on the site of the shuttered O'Reilly's Pub at 2672 Coral Street.

According to KCFC president Lena Helen, it was the husband-and-wife team of Mike and Sue Wade -- two neighborhood investors who've since become co-op members -- who came to KCFC's aid after hearing of its inability to secure a site.

Not only did the Wades purchase the former O'Reilly's Pub and agree to lease the building at a low rate to the co-op, the Wades also included an option for co-op members to purchase the site at a future date.

More exciting still is the news that the co-op has secured a license to serve beer on-site. A small in-store café offering food, beer and other non-alcoholic beverages will be included in the plans, say Helen. Take-away beer will also be sold.

To learn more about becoming a co-op member -- all members will be have ownership in the store and access to the co-op's members-only discount -- visit the KCFC website.

Way back in April 2011, Flying Kite brought you the story of Manayunk's Venice Island -- which sits between the Manayunk Canal and the Schuylkill River -- and its nearly ruined Venice Island Recreation Center.

At the time, the rec center was preparing to undergo a $45 million rehab that would include athletic fields, a park, a small spray pool, a multi-use building and a 250-seat performing arts center. The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) helped arrange the capital funds as a compromise after announcing that an EPA-mandated sewage overflow tank was being constructed in the area.

Some three years later -- and eight years after the project's planning and preparation stage first kicked off -- Manayunk's community development organizations are finally ready to announce the upcoming grand opening of what has been dubbed the Lower Venice Island Park and Performance Center.

"What's really interesting about the site is that it's in the center of a lot of options for outdoor recreation," says Kay Sykora of Destination Schuylkill River, adding that in conjunction with the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the park and performance center (which will probably happen sometime in September), an outdoor recreation event called Play Manayunk will be hosted for the general public.

The "adventure for city dwellers" organization known as Discover Outdoors will be on hand during Play Manayunk, and opportunities for both kayaking and dragon boating should be on offer, according to Sykora, who also hopes to make bicycles available for those who'd like to ride on the Schuylkill River Trail. A geocaching event is also being scheduled, along with an attempt at earning a Guinness World Records entry, possibly by way of a sit-up competition.

A concrete date for both Play Manayunk and the Venice Island ribbon cutting ceremony should be available come mid-summer; stay tuned to Flying Kite for more details.

If you need a sign that Philly's retail infrastructure is getting back on track, look no further than the stretch of Germantown Avenue that runs through the northwestern neighborhood of Chestnut Hill.

In early April, the Chestnut Hill Business Association (CHBA) announced that five new shops have either recently opened on the avenue or will soon, while a sixth shop has moved into a larger location "to accommodate its rapid expansion," according to a release.

The avenue's latest addition, the children's boutique Villavillekula (the name is a Pippi Longstocking reference), celebrated its arrival with an opening reception at the end of March. The Chocolate Hill Candy & Fudge Shop, meanwhile, opened in December and has already proven popular with kids and grownups alike.

According to CHBA Executive Director Martha Sharkey, the growth of the neighborhood's retail scene owes a large debt to the organization's retail recruitment program, which launched four years ago. The neighborhood has welcomed 15 new shops and eight new restaurants in that time.

"We are very lucky to have this program," says Sharkey. "For a downtown district, it's always challenging -- with malls, and with other places for people to shop -- to really create a vibrant, thriving community. The retail recruitment has really been essential to us."

The intersection of 52nd and Market streets in West Philly has struggled for decades, but prior to SEPTA's reconstruction of the Market-Frankford Line, which wrecked economic havoc on the area, the 52nd Street retail corridor was better known as West Philly's Main Street -- a proud city-within-the-city where small businesses thrived.

The Enterprise Center Community Development Corporation (TEC-CDC) has been working for five years to bring that vitality back. And thanks to a grant provided by the Philadelphia Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), they recently hired the street's first-ever commercial corridor manager, Akeem Dixon, whose job description involves returning the retail corridor to its former glory.

That's a tall order, to be sure, but according to Dana Hanchin of the Philadelphia LISC office, initiatives are already moving forward.

At a recent stakeholders meeting, TEC-CDC revealed some of the key elements of its commercial corridor work plan. It includes beautification efforts such as pop-up gardens on vacant lots, and the launch of both a corridor-specific newsletter and a business directory. A biweekly radio program covering the corridor is now airing on West Philly's community radio station, WPEB 88.1 FM, and a branding campaign is also in the works.

Meanwhile, Dixon continues to act as an intermediary between business owners and residents in the area -- something of an impartial ombudsman, whose top priority involves "getting everyone at the same table, and talking," as LISC Philadelphia's James Crowder puts it.

"I can't say that wasn't happening before," says Crowder. "But I can say it's happening in a way now that's way more efficient and productive."

It's been four long years since Postgreen Homes, the sustainable development company, made public its intention to construct a contemporary 14-unit Fishtown project with the unlikely moniker of "Awesometown."

In late March, during a public launch party at Lloyd Whiskey Bar, Postgreen announced that the ultra energy-efficient project is finally going to happen. ISA is the architectural firm responsible for the design.

According to Postgreen's Chad Ludeman, the process of financing Awesometown has been a bit of a departure for the company. As the result of a partnership with the New Kensington Community Development Corporation (NKCDC), Postgreen is pricing four of the 14 customizable townhomes at a discounted rate, making them affordable for moderate-income families.

Unlike with most collaborations between for-profit and nonprofit developers, the funds for Awesometown -- which will sit between Thompson and Moyer Streets -- are coming entirely from private sources.

"We're just treating this like a normal project," says Ludeman, "and using the proceeds from the sales of the market-rate units to subsidize the moderate-income units." (Moderate-income residents of Awesometown will be required to have incomes below 100 percent of the city's median income rate.)

Awesometown's market-rate townhomes are selling for $399,000. The company hopes to acheive LEED platinum status for the project -- each of the units will come stocked with eco-friendly appliances, an Energy Star HVAC system and triple pane windows.

Postgreen also worked with the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) to develop a stormwater management plan for the site, 95 percent of which will be permeable, thanks to eco-friendly paving and green roof decks constructed atop each home.

Visit the Postgreen Homes blog for more details on the project and to view an Awesometown promo video.

Michael Harris has been executive director of the South Street Headhouse District -- the city's second-oldest business improvement district -- for two years now. One of the first things that struck him about the historic stretch of South Fourth Street known as Fabric Row -- which runs between South and Catherine Streets -- was the dated and run-down feel of the strip.

Harris was also struck by the fact that many of the new businesses and contemporary boutiques moving into the area are investing in their own properties. Meanwhile, the public elements of Fabric Row, he says, "don't really reflect all the good things that are going on."

And so, along with the Community Design Collaborative, Headhouse District put together a conceptual design for Fabric Row that includes streetscape improvements -- park benches, planters and pedestrian-level lighting, for example. The plan also calls for building façade renovations, an aspect of the project Harris hopes to have funded via the Department of Commerce's Storefront Improvement Program.

Because construction funds for the proposed improvements haven't yet been raised, there's no official timeline for the plan. At the moment, Headhouse District is still rolling it out to the street's stakeholders and attempting to gauge interest.

"There's a tremendous energy going on along Fourth Street right now," says Harris, adding that Fabric Row today has an amazing mix of businesses both brand-new and generations old. "What we're trying to do is to draw that identity out, and make it more apparent."

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania made public its plans to construct a research park on 23 acres of land formerly owned by DuPont in the Lower Schuylkill section of Grays Ferry. The parcel is now being referred to as "the South Bank."

Flying Kite has reported extensively on the long-range development plans for the Lower Schuylkill River, but no announcement has generated as much public chatter and excitement as the recent one from Penn; it is just one small ingredient in a much larger campus development recipe known as Penn Connects 2.0, a so-called master plan "which has added nearly 3 million square feet of space to Penn’s campus since 2006," according to a release.

One of the highlights of the South Bank will be a business incubator and accelerator called the Pennovation Center. (Current tenants will remain onsite after renovations begin.) That complex will feature lab space and a collaborative technology-transfer ecosystem that Penn hopes will eventually infuse the entire South Bank campus.

According to Penn's Executive Director of Real Estate Ed Datz, the campus will be available to a wide range of users, from startups that grow out of university research to those without any previous university affiliation. The master plan, designed by Philadelphia-based firm WRT, creates a framework with initial development focused on light industrial and flex-use buildings.

"The one consistent is the opportunity to let young, upstart companies have space -- at a reasonable rate -- to gather, to share ideas, and to advance their particular discipline," says Datz.

While an exact construction timeline hadn't been revealed, the multi-phase renovation work at the South Bank site may begin as early as this fall.

Not long ago, the intersection of South 17th and Carpenter Streets in Graduate Hospital was home to a trio of underused vacant lots. All three were owned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) -- it had been attempting to unload the land for a decade.

Now that intersection is beginning to transform in a major way.

The sustainably-designed mixed-use project known as Carpenter Square will soon rise there. And due partly to the interest generated by that project, PRA recently released an RFP for the still-empty lot on the opposite side of 17th Street.

Meanwhile, according to the South of South Neighborhood Association's (SOSNA) Andrew Dalzell, that organization is "just waiting on the weather to get good" before moving forward with its plans for Carpenter Green, a small corner park slated for the intersection's northwest corner.

After signing a lease with the PRA and surveying neighbors to discover which amenities would be most in demand at the parklet (trash cans, lighting, trees and seating were all popular), SOSNA now has to settle on one of three possible designs before raising funds for Carpenter Green's construction.

Also coming soon to the immediate area: A new vision for the playground at the Edwin M. Stanton School, which sits just two blocks north of the intersection.

"2014 could be a very bright year for 17th and Carpenter," says Dalzell after running down the details behind Carpenter Square, Carpenter Green, the E.M. Stanton School playground, and the potential for new construction on the remaining lot. "With just those four things, suddenly that's pretty transformative for this two-block area."

In a classic case of necessity as mother of invention, Temple Fox School of Business student Ofo Ezeugwu has developed a website for renters to rate landlords. He observed that students living in Philadelphia were often vulnerable in the rental process.

"I hatched the idea in February 2012 when I was running for Temple's VP of External Affairs," says Ezeugwu. "Many of my dealings had to do with students' relations with off-campus entities and opportunities. I thought it would be great if students could rate their landlords the same way they rate their professors on RateMyProfessor.com."

WhoseYourLandlord.com launched in October 2012 with fellow Temple student Nik Korablin as web developer. The startup's unusually spelled name regularly raises questions, but Ezeugwu explains that the choice of homonym is intentional — the possessive form of the word 'who' signifies a return of ownership to tenants.

Since its launch, the website has grown to include users in multiple schools across different states. A "fall tour" of East Coast colleges promoted the site and encouraged users to rate landlords in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Maryland, Washington, D.C., North Virginia and New York. Students can also rate on-campus housing such as dorms and residential halls.

Next steps include launching a mobile app in early 2014, and incorporating a way for landlords to respond to comments users leave on their profiles. The growing company also plans to hire in the new year.